IPods, environmental noise eyed as teens’ hearing loss rises

By gerencherk

Americans are used to protecting their hearing before shooting a gun at a firing range. Now that a new study shows the portion of U.S. teenagers with hearing loss has jumped 31% in the last 20 years, will the same message about loud and sustained high decibels reach the generation that proudly sports ear buds and listens for hours to personal music players like the iPod?

About one in five teenagers had some kind of hearing loss in 2005-2006, up from 15% of teenagers in the late 1980s and early 90s, according to a study of nearly 5,000 people age 12 to 19 published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Kids from poor families were significantly more likely to have hearing loss than those living above the federal poverty level, the study found. The hearing tests used in the study were conducted the same way using the same basic technology between the two time periods.

The cause of teens’ increased hearing loss is unclear. Researchers say factors such as nutrition, medication side effects and exposure to toxins need more study, as does noise from things like portable music players and the environment. Even though noise didn’t prove to be the smoking gun in this study, many other studies show noise exposure does play a role in hearing loss and it needs closer scrutiny, said Dr. Joseph Shargorodsky, lead author of the new JAMA study and a resident in head and neck surgery in the Harvard combined program in Boston.

Most teenagers in the study only had a slight hearing loss, but even a small hearing impairment can lead to big changes in academic achievement and quality of life if left unchecked.

“Kids might not even notice” if they have slight hearing loss, Shargorodsky said.

The changes might be subtle. They may not be able to hear whispering or have to sit in the front of a classroom to catch the teacher’s words. But with the exception of a few temporary medical conditions, hearing loss is usually irreversible, he said. “Once it’s gone it’s gone and it will only get worse.”

The study did show progress in vaccinating children against common causes of ear infections and in detecting and treating ear infections effectively when they did happen, Shargorodsky said. Kids who had sustained multiple ear infections weren’t more prone to hearing loss in the latter 2005-06 group whereas those in the late 1980s and early 90s were.

“We have gotten better at picking [ear infections] up and treating them quickly,” he said. “That’s part of the good news of this.”

While noise is an important contributing factor to pursue, other risks need further study as well. A recent study in the March 2010 issue of the American Journal of Medicine showed that adult men who regularly took common pain relievers such as acetaminophen, aspirin and ibuprofen were at increased risk of hearing loss. But such a study hasn’t been performed in kids yet, Shargorodsky said.

“In general, kids are getting medications more now than they have been in the past,” he said. “There’s a possibility there are side effects.”

Noise, and especially that from personal music players, is a likely culprit for the rise in teens’ hearing loss, said Laurie Hanin, an audiologist and executive director of the Center for Hearing and Communication, a rehabilitation center for people with hearing loss in New York.

“It’s a logical guess,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense when people are healthier.”

Normal aging is a risk factor for hearing loss, but the association between the two is unclear. Studies in developing countries that have less environmental noise than the U.S. raise the question of whether hearing loss is as inevitable as people here may think, Hanin said.

“There’s some question now: is it just because you’re aging or is it a lifetime of accumulated exposure to noise?” she said. “You can’t say it is noise, but in these other countries where there’s less age-related hearing loss, there’s less noise.”

In the 1980s, when bulky, tape-playing Walkmans were all the rage, it wasn’t as easy for people to sustain hearing damage from personal music players as it is now, Hanin said. Walkmans would run out of batteries and require listeners to carry around multiple cassettes if they wanted to hear more than an hour’s worth of music at a time.

“Improvements in personal technology allow someone to listen to music much louder and for much longer periods than in the past,” she said.

While more people may be aware of the problem of hearing loss, it may take a while before they take the proper precautions. Hanin compared it to the slow acceptance of the need to limit sun exposure because of its link to skin cancer.

What to know and do

Hearing loss affects 36 million Americans. Here are five things you should know about it. I also offer tips in this video.

1. Hearing loss is gradual and results from cumulative damage. So pay attention to any ringing in the ears or feelings of fullness or muffling. If your child can’t hear you from three feet away when listening to music, it’s too loud, Hanin said. And if your teenager has trouble in school or in social situations, you might want to have him or her checked for hearing loss.

2. Help teens control their exposure to noise. Consider purchasing noise-reducing ear buds to drown out background noise that otherwise can lead teens to boost the volume on their music players. But remember that noise-reducing ear buds won’t protect your hearing, Hanin said. “It just makes the noise a little lower so you don’t have to turn your iPod up to overcome the noise.” Apple also offers an app that lets people set an upper limit on noise, Shargorodsky said.

3. If you take small children to sporting events or other noisy places, consider protecting them with low-cost, noise-reducing earmuffs. Sports fans got a new view of this when the one-year-old son of New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees appeared wearing earmuffs to his dad’s Super Bowl celebration earlier this year.

4. If you’re having trouble understanding speech, get an evaluation from an audiologist. It’s usually covered by insurance.

5. Protecting your ears early in life can help you avoid or delay hearing loss and can make the difference between possibly needing hearing aids in your 80s as opposed to when you’re only 50 or 60. Besides the potential hit to quality of life, hearing aids aren’t cheap, and they’re typically not covered by insurance. “The average price of a hearing aid is $2,000 for one,” Hanin said. But there’s good news if you end up needing them. “They work incredibly well,” she said. “They are not ugly anymore. They’re not your grandparents’ hearing aids.”

About Health Matters

Health Matters is a blog-style round-up of news and analysis concerning consumer health and the business of health care. The lead writer is MarketWatch reporter Kristen Gerencher, who also writes the Vital Signs column. Andrea Coombes and Jonathan Burton contribute editing. Gerencher won a 2006 explanatory journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists-Northern California for a series she did on health savings accounts.